e, I saw you
whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat
and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"

Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders as a correct
one, but though her love was blind to his pimples and ignored his
stumpiness, she could not deny the spectacles, which were to her as
peepholes affording visions of a blissful married future.

"He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti at home in Germany. She is
sick, and my father also, and all my little brothers and sisters are sick
too," gulped Trudi, sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features
against the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfortable of the two beds,
"because they hear that I am in this place, and they so greatly fear that
I will be dead."

"You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged you that you were an
orphan brought up by an aunt."

"Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant and perfectly dry
countenance, and launching the utterance in the forbidden English
language, "and I vill now go. I vish not to stop here longer."

"Very well, but where are you going?"

"That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-dressed head and relapsing
into her native language, "has nothing to do with the gracious lady."

There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the large face attached
to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious lady, realising that Trudi formed
the one link between herself and the rough, strange, suspicious,
unfriendly male world outside, pocketed her pride to temporise. Let Trudi
remain as companion and attendant to the German refugee-widow yet another
week, and the month's due of wages, already trebled in virtue of a service
involving risk, should be substantially increased.... But Trudi only
snorted and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself confronting not
only a rat determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly
inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering.

What was to be done? It is quite possible to be brave, adventurous, and
daring without a revolver, its absence may even impart a faint sense of
relief to one, as being no longer under the necessity of shooting somebody
with it at a pinch, but without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them
on, Lady Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the fact from the
rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window and drew the blind aside, and
was instantly confronted wi